Scary ? It is !!!

I used to think about it a lot. Never really talked about this to anyone … today I decided to change that. The reason was that I read an article with similar thoughts and I was actually scared. What am I talking about? Well I am talking about modern life. I am talking about today. Or may be even the future.

REWIND – ten years back, I was jus about to finish school. Internet as known to me was a luxury to have at homes and in the few Internet cafes we had it used to be 70 bucks an hour. Some of u may have grown up downloading music and have a TV with at least 70 channels, unlike me n a lot many others who had to go to shops and buy records (I have used them but din have the luck to buy them) and CDs, in fact even tapes. The TV only played Door Darshan and may be towards the later part of my school days the Zee n Star revolution happened. The mobile phones now are small n efficient rather than the brick sized ones I remember my dad lugging around (I never had the luxury of a mobile phone till college, still it ain’t anywhere close to the stuff we get today) and ten years back during my school days, Facebook would have been a description of getting slapped by a paperback by my geography teacher.

Things have changed! Digital technology has been the biggest turning point to impact day-to-day life. Providing us the means of communication, social networking, endless entertainment, learning, its jus unstoppable, I have grown with it, and have realized how it is affecting our behavior and our very patterns of thinking. Unlike early days we are evolving on a daily basis and no doubt it is exciting but scary at the same time. There is always a cost with any advancement however; will it cost us our life?

I have realized that with the introduction of computers into almost every aspect of my life, personal and professional, I rarely find myself writing with a pen and paper. On top of that at times I feel that my brain only works well when I am hitting a keyboard. This is where I kind of start thinking if this am an evolution or degradation of my abilities. May be I am jus struggling to handle too many things at once these days. It is scary but its worse if u see my handwriting! The condition and quality of my handwriting is something else altogether, pretty embarrassing that it might pass off as a doing of a three year old kid. If u still think that this may not be a problem for you try and check handwriting of our older generations who still manage without computers, its beautiful ain’t it?

Technology has made us dependent in many things; I used to remember the phone numbers of all my classmates by heart. Now I have to rely on my phone book in my mobile phone … why jus the phone numbers, to-do lists, birthday reminders (orkut n facebook or even the lame attempt by birthday alarms), I fcuking can’t even remember my spellings well. I bloody well blame the sms n chatting culture to be blamed for that. I still prefer writing full words in my sms’s – which does manage to raise a few eyebrows, but even here the T9 n word processing dictionaries have spoilt the ability for us to think.

I feel that the following picture is really apt for the situation that we are heading for the Planet of the Apes era sooner than the great writer expected.

evolution or is it